Reading to Become a Better Writer
“Who inspires you?”
Recently, the author of The Jungle Law, Victoria Vinton, gave a very insightful interview. Within it, she quoted Gary Paulson who once said that aspiring writers should “read like a wolf eats”. Victoria also went on to give her own advice, “Read voraciously. Read attentively. Read deeply and diversely. Read with your heart and mind alert to every nuance of language and craft.”
So � who inspires you?
Read the Genre
Even if you never get past the titles of Ã?¾ of the books being published in the genre you write in, it’s important to know what other people are doing. For writers, being aware of what’s going on means knowing what’s being published, even if you can’t read everything.
New titles bring new ideas and techniques. Absorbing the new creations and voices tells you a lot about what’s working. So, if you write romance, you should know what’s being published in the romance genre. You should be aware of what topics are flooding the shelves, and which ones aren’t showing up much. Take the whole romance shelf at a supermarket and look at how the titles represent a genre – what’s missing? What’s new, something you’ve never seen before?
If you haven’t read between the lines yet (but believe me, I’m counting on the fact that you have), the biggest idea is this: find out what has been done, and what’s been done to death. As long as you develop your writing style, your own unique voice will help your story shine – but if that story is something that’s been done over and over by other authors, you’re going to be disappointed once you’ve finished. If you’ve been reading and watching what new books come out, though, you’ll know what other authors have done with your brilliant idea so that you can do something unique, slanting the same idea in a way no one but you could have thought to do.
Learning how to do things like work descriptions into narrative seamlessly, format your dialogue so that it flows naturally, and how to show instead of tell âÂ?¦ it’s easiest to learn these things when you read them in a good book instead of kill yourself trying to learn from hundreds of how-to articles.
Read Outside the Genre
So, you’re reading your genre and you know what’s being published, learning what you like and what you don’t like, and writing more effectively because of it. Have you stopped to take a look outside your genre? I mean, why should you want to buy a fantasy if you write romance, right? Well âÂ?¦ there are reasons.
Exposing yourself to new ideas becomes a little bit difficult in a genre that is flooded with the same authors, or similar concepts. Where one genre is conservative, another can be very experimental. So, if you take a step back and look at a new genre completely, you’re going to expose yourself to a whole new world.
I often refer to romance writing – simply because I love to write romance books. I’m currently in the middle of writing a new one, just now hitting that point where everything starts to pour out onto the page as if it wasn’t even me writing. One thing that I’ve learned about the romance market, though, is that people love to jump on the bandwagon. By watching what’s being published, and then referring to writer’s guidelines, I can see some glaring “missing pieces” – there’s a lot of the tried and true regency romances. There’s plenty of rags to riches stories, and even more stories about poor women marrying rich men. These books are published because they work, and people love to read them.
What’s missing is something that can’t be written well unless the author enjoys books that come outside the romance genre. Fantasy, science fiction, mystery âÂ?¦ when these genres are crafted tightly into a love story, publishers are dying for them right now. Romance simply hasn’t tackled much of the fantasy scene beyond the vampire slant (yes, the vampire angle is weighing down romance shelves heavily), and science fiction is done even less. But publishers are asking for it.
Find out what is missing in the genre that you write, and then start devouring the books from another genre that fills the hole. You can take ideas from another genre and incorporate them into your own work, giving it a freshness that immediately boosts your quality as a writer. Anything that tells a story is worth reading, regardless of how the story is told.
The Real Story
Reading both very well crafted works and the crap that your big brother insists is perfection actually helps you learn to write better. It teaches you how to avoid clich�©, and if you can pinpoint what makes crap, well, crap, you can stay far away from putting it into your own writing.
One thing that I’ve noticed a lot of my writing friends do is studiously avoid non-fiction because they think that it is âÂ?¦ well, I’ll stick with a theme here and say it again – they think that non-fiction is crap writing. It is unimaginative, not creative, and doesn’t have anything to offer their fiction writing.
They couldn’t be more wrong (though I’ll use my manners and not tell them that in person).
Non-fiction offers information – that’s the whole point of non-fiction. It tells us more about something that we never knew, or it expands our understanding of something that we do know.
Remember that line from Anne of Green Gables, where Anne is being told to, “Write what you know”? How are you going to know something new if you don’t know about it – and believe me, it’s easier to write about a topic you do know instead of letting your lack of knowledge stain your writing or keep you from writing entirelyâÂ?¦
One of the things that the main character of the book I’m writing loves is tropical fish. He thrives on their beauty, and cares for them as if they were the most precious thing he owns. Personally, I know nothing about tropical fish – it wasn’t me that wanted them included in the story, it was the main character, and he was very adamant about it being done. I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy a bunch of tropical fish just to appease my fictional character (although something tells me he would have found that amusing), so what could I do? I went to the library, signed out everything I could find on tropical fish, their habitat, their care and feeding, diseases and how to cure them âÂ?¦ every single thing that spoke about tropical fish, I suddenly had a real need to know.
In other words, write about something you know – but if you don’t know about something, go learn. Pepper your reading list with non-fiction topics from biographies to how-to. Biographies can be a lot of fun, and teach you a lot about character development; what makes these historical figures so enduring?
I recently found a book called, Uppity Women of Medieval Times by Vicki Leon, and inside that book I found the story of Isabel La Catolica, a medieval woman who survived banishment, dangerous plots, and the intrigues of a slimy half brother and illegitimate sister, as well as became adept at gamesmanship, military tactic, and the art of private negotiations âÂ?¦ all as a teenager. Does this not make the stuff of a fantastic heroine? And the entire character sketch is already provided for me, made of the stuff of history. Don’t turn your nose at the non-fiction genre, it will give you more opportunities than you realize.
Become a Critical Reader
Beyond reading everything you can, you have to learn how to take what you read to a new level – you need to become a critical reader. Here are the steps to doing just that:
1. Determine your purpose before you start reading. Are you reading to gather information? Preparing for a book club discussion? Or are you reading for enjoyment?
2. Study the title of the book. Before you ever turn a page, what does the title tell you about what you’re about to read?
3. Look at how the writing is structured. Are there subdivisions within a chapter? How many scenes are in a single chapter? How many chapters are there between major, dramatic scenes?
4. Read carefully and highlight places that are confusing or so perfectly well written that you want to re-read them later. Keep a dictionary nearby, so that you can look up words that you’re unfamiliar with. Expanding your vocabulary is always a bonus.
5. Take notes of what themes occur over and over within the book. How many times are you seeing the same key issue or unique idea? These little things can make a novel pack a stronger impact, by constantly playing the same theme so that there is a definite emotion tying everything together.
6. What one question would you like to ask the author, after reading the whole book? Is there something that they didn’t really wrap up, or a scene that stuck out and you’d like to know why they wrote it?
7. As a completed piece of work, how was the book? Think about what you liked best, whether it was word structure or plot, and what confused or irritated you. Why did you like some things, but others made you want to skim through a whole scene or two?
Read and Read and Then Write
Reading teaches you how to write better, how to sound more convincing and natural, and it shows you how you don’t want to write. You can find ideas, topics, tidbits and facts, and even characters to weave into your stories.
Don’t let reading become a reason not to write, though. If you want to become a writer, you have to do one essential thing: write. Every day. Set a goal for yourself – even three pages a day on your new novel, or one poem a day for a collection. Make sure that you find a happy balance between reading and writing, or you’ll happily spend all your time reading and never get anything done in your writing life.
Write as much as you read, and you’ll quickly see that your reading has made you a better author.
